The Prophet’s Faith … and Mine

September 9, 2012

Texts:
Is 35: 4, 6-7a
Is 5: 8-9, 20, 25

The book of Isaiah was written in the midst of the seemingly endless suffering of Babylonian captivity, yet parts of it are beautiful and uplifting poems of God’s care. 

Say to those who are of a fearful heart
“Be strong, do not fear!

…

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;

The burning sand shall become a pool
and the thirsty ground springs of water;

But then parts of it are not so uplifting.

The anger of the Lord was kindled against his people,
and he stretched out his hand against them and struck them;
the mountains quaked,

And their corpses were like
refuse in the streets

For all his anger has not turned away. 

“Corpses in the streets.”  Hmm? 

We like to hear about the generous God, but about the God of retribution … not so much.  Those image seem so vulgar, so contrary to the God of love and forgiveness and mercy.

How did the prophets come up with it?  What allowed them to speak such beautiful phrases like “streams in the desert” and such repulsive ones like "corpses in the streets"?  Where did they get that chutzpa to speak so brazenly of God?

In his new book The Practice of Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann suggests something quite outrageous:

[P]rophetic proclamation [he says] is an attempt to imagine the world as though YHWH, the creator of the world, the deliverer of Israel, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ … were a real character and an effective agent in the world.  I use the subjunctive “were,” [says Brueggemann] because such a claim is not self-evident and remains to be established again and again in every such utterance.

An attempt to imagine YHWH as though YHWH were real and effective!

It’s as though the prophets saw what was happening in their society and recognized the connections and truths beneath the surface.  Then, since they did have faith that YHWH was an actor in the drama, they had to imagine what YHWH would say and do in those circumstances. 

Where’s YHWH in all that’s happening?  What might be YHWH’s words of judgment … or comfort?  What are the consequences of what we’ve done?  Will YHWH be merciful and forgiving or overwhelmingly brutal? 

Just to be clear, Brueggemann is not saying that the prophets are proclaiming something imaginary or that they somehow don’t really believe it to be true.  He’s saying that to be able to proclaim the fullness of the truth they perceived required mind-boggling leaps of imagination.

OK, but what gave them such confidence that they were really hearing the voice of YHWH?  How could they speak with such power and certainty? 

Unless the nature of revelation has changed in the last 2500 years, there’s no reason to suppose that their confidence came from hearing a booming voice out of the sky.  Let’s suppose that YHWH ordinarily spoke to the prophets the way YHWH spoke to Elijah, with a still small voice … or speaks to us, when the call from YHWH seems more an inner certainty on which we’re willing to bet our lives.  If so, then the question remains: Why did the prophets have such confidence that the images of their imagination described the nature of YHWH in their situation?  And ultimately, in the midst of our current social, economic, and political chaos, how can we find such confidence that YHWH is a player in history?

Brueggemann suggests that the prophets’ certainty derived from their trust in Torah and from their trust in the whole story of Israel that proclaimed the reality of a covenant with requirements and consequences.  The prophets were people of the book.  They knew, for instance, that when the nation abandoned its poor, there would be dire consequences.  Israel’s whole story didn’t make sense without a God who’d been an active and effective agent in the world. 

But how did they know that for certain?  Well, as we of the Enlightenment define “certainty,” the prophets probably didn’t know for certain.  But the modern kind of formal, logical, left-brained certainty wasn’t for them the most meaningful way of knowing.  Their faith was that their history was nonsense without a God who was a real character active in history.  In their story the behavior of YHWH’s people had real world consequences and YHWH had been pretty clear about the nature of those consequences,

The prophets’ writings are often poems, sometimes quite non-specific.  The writings were not memos. The prophets weren’t just scribes passing along God’s dictation to the people.  They weren’t fortune tellers; for the most part they probably didn’t know the exact specifics.  Their prophetic preachings were acts of imagination—sometimes beautiful, sometimes repulsive—based on the previous acts of imagination (such as the Exodus story) uttered by other prophetic writers that told a history of Israel that could only be explained by a God who was active in their world.

The prophets had faith in their story, faith that the covenant actually meant something, faith that there was a powerful moral order to the universe.  Ignoring the denials, the explanations and the excuses of the dominant consciousness, they knew that there were consequences to breaking the covenant.  Their writing—often with the powerful hyperbole of poetry—proclaims what they believed to be the only explanation for their history, the activity of YHWH.

About 25 years ago, not long after our family arrived in Washington and I began practicing medicine among the city’s poor, it became painfully clear that the same structures of society that had given me my privilege had also caused the suffering of my patients and many others.  Our society had not just built their suffering, not just gone on to ignore it, but had utterly abandoned the poor.  And, at some point back then, I was reading in Jeremiah and Amos who save their harshest words for those who shatter the covenant by abandoning the poor.

So it was obvious to me then that if the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures had been among us, they would have been proclaiming the broken covenant, warning us Americans of the devastating consequences of our faithlessness.  We were disobedient and we’d pay for it.  And so if, 25 years ago, I’d had the prophets’ faith that God was a player in our world, I could have been out there proclaiming that message.  But the nation seemed to be at the height of its social, political and economic power; there were no dark clouds in sight.  I’d have been considered a kook, a street corner preacher with a loud speaker, someone we pass with embarrassment.

And now, two and a half decades later, we’re in the midst of those consequences, and—as I’ve explored with you in earlier teachings here—it’s not just coincidence that our deepening crises comes after our breaking the covenant.  We’ve failed to care for the poor, we’ve worshiped the idol of consumption, and we’ve failed to see Creation as holy.  We can draw a straight line from our shattering of the covenant to these troubling times.

As modern prophets, we can look outside the box of the usual explanations and excuses of the dominant consciousness and testify that the recent financial collapse, society’s growing inequality, the nation’s decline as a world leader, the paralysis of our political system, and the environmental devastation of the Earth are all consequences of our faithlessness.

Now, I’d like to pivot and tell you a little of my own journey and how this understanding of the prophets is deepening my faith.  Beginning in college and for years after, mine was the faith of the Enlightenment.  By Enlightenment faith I mean that I believed that everything could ultimately be understood in terms of the physical, provable rules of the universe.  Of course, science didn’t know enough about the rules yet, but ultimately, my faith went, science would be able to explain everything.  It was pretty crude, but to the extent that I formulated it consciously, that’s pretty much what I put my faith in. 

And then thirty some years ago—as Marja and I were coming out of that long period of agnosticism—I began to recognize that there were foundational realities of which I was already convinced that were simply inconsistent with the Enlightenment perspective.  There is, for instance, a moral order to the world.  While humanity may be confused about the details, most of us know that there is right and wrong.  We know we aren’t supposed to do certain things even if they give us great advantage.  We know that we’re meant to be there for others, to sacrifice ourselves, if necessary.  We know that we’re to care about the poor. 

Science can’t explain these realities and never will be able to; they are outside its realm of knowing.  Just to be clear, I still believe deeply in science, but true science is not totalizing, that is, it doesn’t claim to understand everything.  It claims to know one very important kind of truth, but a good scientist also understands that there’s much that science can’t know, for instance about the a moral universe.  But so-called scientific rationalists insist that everything can ultimately be explained scientifically.

I don’t want to spend too much time defending myself against the scientific rationalists, but they usually explain away, say, a moral universe, by hypothesizing why we believe in a moral universe.  Such beliefs, they might point out, gave human beings evolutionary advantages.#ftn_ref2  Or, they might say, moral belief is actually just enlightened self-interest. 

Now both may be explanations for why we might believe in the moral order, but you and I know that the moral order is more than belief; it really does exist. 

So, I realized that I was living an Enlightenment faith that was inconsistent with important parts of my own worldview. 

I found myself almost envious of religious faith—of almost any kind—that could explain those parts of the world that science couldn’t.  Unfortunately, those faiths seemed to insist on belief in certain supernatural events that were not just outside science’s sphere but also contradicted things that science could claim to know.  I just couldn’t accept this Christian faith if it meant denying science, but I did want to have something that could better explain the world, something larger than science.  So I’ve been intellectually stuck for years.

Now I knew that many churches—such as Eighth Day—were beyond a crass supernaturalism, but most churches—and most of you here (I think)—do believe that the physical resurrection of Jesus body is central to the faith.  And I can’t go there.  I’ve been able to call this community my own only because we’ve been explicit about accepting a range of faith beliefs; even so, I’ve never felt sure I belong.  I’ve always felt myself something of an outsider, despite assurances from some of you to the contrary.  What is it, actually, that’s Christian about my faith?

But I’ve come finally to accept that what I do know can only be explained by a reality beyond the provable.  We humans aren’t alone.  YHWH—whoever, whatever, however YHWH is—is there.  I can’t describe YHWH at all, even to myself.  Other than YHWH’s commands, I understand nothing about who or what or how YHWH is; I don’t even think of YHWH as a being; I don’t like to use a pronoun to refer to YHWH.  For me the Hebrew tradition—of not even speaking the name, of just using the letters, YHWH without any vowels—is the closest to a “name” for God that I can understand.  Even to use the word “God” sometimes seems too anthropomorphizing.  Nevertheless, somehow I know that we’re not alone.  There is a moral universe and its arc does bend toward justice.  We are, somehow, in covenant with this YHWH.  As confused as I am about believing in YHWH, I can’t explain the universe unless something—this YHWH—is active and effective in the world.

On what do I base this faith?  This is where Brueggemann has helped me.  I can now explain it the same way that I think the prophets might have explained it: They knew their own story; they knew their history in which YHWH’s hand could be clearly seen.   Even more, they’d come to trust that story.  So they saw what was happening around them confident that YHWH’s hand was in it.  How could they describe that to the people?  A memo wasn’t going to do it.  Their powerful, sometimes overwhelming poetry was the result of what they knew, their faith that God was active and effective and their need to describe the reality around them in terms of YHWH’s presence.

Just to be clear, I’m sure that there was much more to the prophets’ faith than their belief that God was a player in the world.  They had a relationship with YHWH.  They knew YHWH’s love and mercy.  They understood the holy nature of their covenant.  And much more, I’m sure. 

Most of that still eludes me.  I’m still working on YHWH’s being a player.  But understanding something of what the storytellers and prophets of the Scriptures were doing gives me an anchor.  I can begin with their story, our story, of bondage in Egypt, of escape, of covenant, of the holiness of Creation, of the consequences of trust, or failure of trust, in YHWH. 

And then there’s our particular story, the stories of Church of the Saviour and Eighth Day, which are so firmly rooted in that larger story.  How else—except for YHWH’s presence—can I understand the story of Potter’s House or FLOC or Christ House or Academy of Hope or Joseph’s House?  You could offer scientific explanations, of course.  But those explanations are too thin, too anemic to get to the depth of our history.  And today, in the present social context, our history allows me to understand the coming economic and political collapse, to proclaim it, and still offer the word of hope.  I can rest myself in our story and build from there.

I know there’s much more for me to get to.  Relationship with YHWH.  Love for YHWH.  Hearing YHWH.  Perhaps even relationship with Christ.  That’s a long way to go, but I’m beginning to see that I can claim belonging in this community without hypocrisy.  I’m beginning to understand our story and to trust it.  And for that I’m grateful.